by Rick Shelley
"If they know they've got reinforcements on the way in, they won't surrender," Joe said after a short pause. "They'll be more afraid of their own warlords than they are of us."
"That's the way I read it too, Joe," Keye said. "They're going to be in a panic, and fighting might seem less dangerous than surrendering. Panicky men are capable of just about anything."
"Yes, sir."
Keye gave Joe specific orders for 2nd platoon. Joe passed those orders on, giving his men the rest of the bad news as well.
"We're up shit creek," Wiz Mackey said, disgust in his voice.
"All we've got to do right now is take care of the Heggies coming north toward us," Joe said. "That might not be as hard as the big shots think."
"What do you mean?" Mort Jaiffer asked.
"They've been fighting for quite a while out there already," Joe said. "Facing four regiments. And we are sitting between them and their supplies. The only ammunition they're going to have left is what they haven't used yet, what they've got with them."
"You think they're going to run dry," Mort said. "Like we did on Porter."
"It's possible," Joe said. "Depends on how much they were carrying, when the last time was that they got supplies before we jumped in, and how much shooting they've been doing. And they've been doing a lot of shooting, according to the captain. It took our guys a long time to break across the canal and start the Heggies running our way. Heggies aren't superhuman. They can't carry much more than we do. It had to run out sooner or later, and it might already be later."
"Sounds like you're trying for a slot in Intelligence," Mort said. "I just hope you're right."
"Me too," Baerclau admitted. "But if we can take care of the Heggies on the ground before the reinforcements start trying to land, we might still come out of this okay." Joe felt a little disgusted with himself, acting like a cheerleader when he wasn't certain that he believed a word he was saying.
—|—
Major General Kleffer Dacik had too much sense of dignity ever to admit to feeling anything so plebeian as "the thrill of the chase," but he did feel it as his command APC raced north along the peninsula. Only a handful of armored personnel carriers had been landed on Tamkailo, all for use as command posts or medical treatment facilities. Most of the APCs that had been carried to Tamkailo remained about the ships, and the fleet had not carried the usual complement of the vehicles. That would have required another three or four ships, and there had never been any expectation that the vehicles would be required for this campaign. With the planned in-and-out nature of the mission, APCs had seemed mostly irrelevant.
The 8th and 5th were now moving north almost as quickly as if they had simply been on a training hike back on the worlds where their home bases were. The 97th and 34th were spread out behind them, also moving forward as quickly as the terrain—rather than the enemy—permitted. On the rare occasions when a Schlinal unit tried to stand and fight, they were hit with massed fire from the Havocs and Wasps.
For a time Dacik had kept his command post behind the skirmish line that was intended to clear the peninsula thoroughly. But he could restrain himself for only so long before ordering his driver to hurry north, to get as close as possible to the 8th's spearhead.
"We've still got to pull rabbits out of a couple of hats," he confided to his aide. "Clear the peninsula, then get men posted to be able to respond in case the Heggie reinforcements try to land on this side of the canal."
"And we won't know where they're going to land until they're more than halfway down, right, General?" Lorenz asked.
Dacik shrugged. "They'll be a lot lower than that before we can be certain where they plan to ground, but we'll be able to start narrowing it down earlier."
"You don't suppose they'd go for one of the other sites, do you, sir?" Hof asked. "Figure on regrouping on the ground before they take us on?"
Dacik hesitated before he said, "If they land at one of the other sites, it could only mean that there are more of them coming that we don't know about yet. Ships that haven't come in-system yet. If this fleet is all that's coming—I mean in the next few days—then they have to engage us immediately. Anything else would help us and hurt them, and any Schlinal warlord who's managed to get high enough to command that many men is going to know that as certainly as I do."
"If they do land at one of the other sites, what do we do?"
Once more Dacik hesitated before he answered. "If they land at either of the other sites, we finish the job here on the peninsula and get the hell off Tamkailo as fast as we can." There were limits.
—|—
Van Stossen wasn't interested in races. He was looking for a good stretch of ground to defend, a line running all of the way across the peninsula. He didn't care if that ground was a hundred meters south of the Schlinal base or two kilometers—except that he hoped it would be closer rather than farther off, to give his men a chance to dig in and set up crew-served weapons before the mass of Heggies hit the line, and before the peninsula grew too wide for what was left of the 13th to adequately man that line.
Spread across the peninsula, the 13th's line was already too thin by half. Each company had to cover 800 meters at the southern edge of the buildings, and the farther south they went, the longer the line would get. Stossen had scarcely needed to tell his staff, "We'll stop at the first suitable place."
That proved to be only 250 meters south of the last walls of the Schlinal base. The line was not quite straight east-west across the peninsula. The lay of the land demanded a slight angle, northwest to southeast. A low ridge ran most of the way across. There was sandy beach along the eastern shore, large rocks at the western end. There were several gaps in the ridge, and in other places it dwindled away to less than a meter in height, but it was good enough. Stossen decided that they were unlikely to find anything more suitable.
"This is it," Joe Baerclau told his platoon as soon as he got the word. "Dig in the best you can." Along the stretch of ridge that Echo Company was given, there was solid rock below no more than ten centimeters of clay that was almost as hard as the rock it covered. "You'll probably have to look for rocks to pile up in front of you," he added. "Do what you can in a hurry."
Second platoon broke down into two squads, four fire teams, now. Joe put each fire team by itself, with ten meters separating them. No one would be able to sneak through a gap that size, not even in the dark, and the fire lanes would overlap. But if the enemy came on in sizeable numbers, with determination, they would be able to break through without difficulty. There was no help for that.
Joe situated himself with first squad, on the end nearest second. He worked as hard as any of his men at preparing the best defensive position he could in a hurry, knowing that the Heggies might be on them almost any minute. He wasn't nearly finished when Al Bergon came over to him.
"How's your hip feel, Sarge?"
Joe stopped working for a moment and blinked. "Forgot all about it. Didn't have time to think about it."
Al smiled. "I guess that means you're doing okay. When this is over, we'll take a look and make sure there aren't any bits of wire left in there that'll have to be cut out." If the medical nanobots in the medpatches had done their work fully, any wire would have been transported up to just below the surface, encased in pimples that could be "popped" to get the metal out.
"Yeah, sure," Joe said absently. He wasn't ready to start thinking past what he was doing. His wounded posterior wasn't hurting. That was all he could worry about.
"You got your position ready?" Joe asked the medic.
"As ready as I can get it." Al shrugged. Medics had very low life expectancies in combat. Al had lasted longer than most. "We have any action, I probably won't get to spend much time in it anyway." He turned and walked away then, without waiting to see if Joe had a reply.
"Sauv? Low?" Joe said, switching to his link to the squad leaders. "Do a quick check on your men. It sounds as if the fighting is getting close. We're likely to have H
eggies in our laps in a few minutes."
The sounds of fighting had been there, in the distance, for some time, a constant background noise that was beginning to get noticeably louder—which meant closer. There might be a few Heggies on their own first—"stragglers" wouldn't be the right word; these would be men who were running faster than their comrades, away from the fight they had been in—but the bulk of the Heggie forces might not be far behind.
Joe moved up on top of the ridge—it was a meter-and-a-half high where he was—and stood there looking first one way and then the other along the line. The ground sloped away a little in front of the ridge, not much, but even a little might help.
Not a bad place to make a stand, Joe thought, transiently amazed that his platoon had actually pulled such a lucky placement. The Heggies will have to do the hard work to get to us.
He looked south, scanning slowly from side to side, a little farther out on each pass. There were tanks out there yet, and who knew how many Heggie mudders—perhaps a couple of thousand of them.
A 205mm artillery shell burst no more than two kilometers south of the ridge. Joe happened to be looking almost directly at the place where it exploded. In the brief glare of the blast, he saw the outline of a Nova tank silhouetted against the light, moving north, toward the ridge.
"Here they come!" Joe shouted on his platoon channel. He jumped back down behind the ridge.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Faro Malmeed used the time of waiting for meditation. That discipline from his childhood had always stood him in good stead in the military. The admiral had ordered all Bat pilots into their fighters, to wait... for whatever. Faro did not know about the squadrons on the others ship, but the Bat pilots of the Constellation class Orion had done nothing but sit in their planes for nearly two hours now. Orion was the lead ship in the fleet, even in front of Capricorn. The Constellations—there were twelve of them in this fleet—were the largest ships in the Accord inventory. Nothing, civilian or military, was larger. That applied not only to the Accord and its member worlds but also to the Schlinal Hegemony and the Dogel Worlds, although the Doges had a ship that was very near the same size. That was—or had been before the tensions between Doges and Hegemons erupted into open war—strictly a civilian freighter.
"Hurry up and wait," Faro mumbled, remembering to make certain that his transmitter was off. Then he switched it on. "Commander, how long are we going to sit here?" he asked.
Lieutenant Commander Osa Ximba, commander of Orion's Indigo Flight, was just as bored by the wait as his pilots were, but he didn't have any good answers, so he gave the standard military answer. "We sit here until they tell us to do something else. Then we'll do the something else."
"But what's going on out there? Have you heard anything at all?" The questions had finally imposed themselves on Faro's meditation a few minutes before, distracting him too much to continue.
"It's about to start out there," Ximba said. "That's all I know."
It wasn't much consolation to Faro. His brother Vign, a Bat pilot aboard the Cetus, might be out there somewhere.
—|—
Three seconds of boost after the Bats of Cetus's Purple Flight were ejected from their hangar was all that was required. After that, they had nothing to do but coast into position. Vign Malmeed, Purple six, had been a Bat pilot for more than two years, but he had yet to come under enemy fire—or get off a shot at any Schlinal vessel, of any size.
This was the first time he had even seen a Schlinal fleet.
The dozen Heggie ships had spread out into battle formation. From end to end, the formation covered more than forty kilometers: three columns of ships in what was called—with less than perfect accuracy—a battle cylinder formation. The nearest vessel was more than 140 kilometers away from Cetus's Purple Flight.
At that distance Vign could not truly see the Boem S3 spaceplanes in the defensive screen around the capital ships. Like the Bat and the Wasp, the Boem did not reflect light. The blips that his targeting system showed him were built up from information cross-linked from nearly every ship in the Accord fleet—movement and computed vectors derived as much from the way that the shadows of Boems occulted sections of the ships they were defending, as from more direct observation.
"They're coming out to meet us," Purple one said. There was certainly no surprise in his voice. The Heggies were expected to intercept them as far out from their ships as possible. The was the purpose of a defensive cap. "Arm all weapons systems."
Vign did not expect to have a shot at any of the Schlinal capital ships. If Purple Flight got through, it would mean that the Heggie defensive screen had broken down completely. The job of this flight, and a half dozen others, was to draw the Schlinal defenders out, engage them, destroy as many as possible, to allow other flights a better chance to get through to the big ships.
Battle in space is not only silent, it is much less exciting visually than many people anticipate. Partly for the same reason. Sound needs a medium, such as air, to carry it. Fires need oxygen—air—to support combustion. Some types of explosives are built with their own oxygen supply. Others depend on rupturing hulls to feed on the oxygen in the atmosphere maintained on the ship... or plane. The fiery trails of rockets are supplied by oxygen carried by the rocket as part of its propellant. That can be the most visual aspect of a duel in space.
The other reason why space battles are so... dull is that they always appear to occur in slow motion. The actual speeds of the ships and planes might be great, but the distances are also great.
"Time to check their reaction time," Purple one said. "Thirty degrees left, thirty degrees up, full thrust."
There was a slight physical rumble within the Bats as their antigrav drives cranked up to maximum. Vign enjoyed the extra sensation of weight pressing him back into his seat. He ran a complete check of his weapons and navigation systems. The computer diagnostics took only a couple of seconds. Then he watched the display on one of his monitors as the Heggies reacted to Purple Flight's acceleration. The Boems changed attitude and went under thrust again.
Both sides were ready for a fight.
—|—
Zel Paitcher was surprised to wake up in the back of a support van, pressed up against the side of the narrow aisle that gave access to bins of tools and parts. There was someone else lying in that aisle with him.
I guess I passed out, Zel thought. His mind seemed unusually clear. It wasn't like waking up from sleep. He felt perfectly alert. But there was a gap in his memory: I wasn't here before; I wasn't injured... was I?
When he tried to think back, his memories were a patchwork of sights and impressions, slow to appear, and they did not seem to connect into a meaningful whole. Shells exploded around the Wasps. Men were running. Roo Vernon was waving, smiling. Lights. Sound. Somehow, all of the bits of the picture started spinning, scene by scene, and all of it together. Zel thought he was going to fall, but then realized that he was already flat on the floor of a van and there was nowhere for him to fall to.
"What happened to me?" He heard the words, so he assumed that he had spoken them out loud. Just to make sure, he repeated the sentence.
"Concussion, sir—I think," an unfamiliar voice said. "That's what the medic said on the radio. You were helping us take care of the others, then you just sorta keeled over. You feeling okay now, sir?"
Zel lifted a hand to his head and touched it experimentally several times. "I don't feel any pain," he said after a moment. "My mind seems to be working, after a fashion."
"We'll have you and the others to a medtech in just a couple of minutes, sir, soon as we find where they are. Things are pretty confused. Last I heard, the Heggies had stopped retreating."
—|—
"What happened?" General Dacik asked on a link that included the commanders of the four regiments moving north along the peninsula, as well as his own staff.
"It's like we hit a brick wall with a rubber band, General," Colonel Foss of the 8th said.
"They had prepared fallback positions ten klicks north of the canal—mines, trenches, gun emplacements. I think the line was already manned as well, at least with a skeleton force. Their troops hit that line, and we had organized fire coming at us much too soon for anything else."
"When did they have time for that?" Dacik demanded, turning to look at his Intelligence officer.
Olsen shook his head, then shrugged his shoulders. "We never saw any of it, sir."
"Our experience was exactly the same on the east side," the 5th's commander, Colonel Kane, added as soon as the others left him an opening. "Prepared positions. Troops waiting for us. It's going to take time to break through this new line, time we don't have."
"What about the 13th?" Foss asked. "Can Stossen move south to nip the Heggies from behind?"
"You men put out reccers to see if this line extends all of the way across the peninsula?" Dacik asked.
Foss and Kane said, "Yes, sir," in unison.
Dacik continued to stare at Major Olsen, who was standing right next to him, about four hundred meters south of the line where the Heggies had stopped to fight. "What's the gap between our line and the 13th, Jorgen?"
Olsen looked down at his mapboard, used a cursor to draw the line, than hit a key along the side of the screen to get the distance. "Just short of seven kilometers, General. The 13th reports enemy activity close to them as well, tanks moving in, presumably infantry as well."
"Nape, Jesiah, we've already targeted the Havocs against the enemy line, and I'm working to bring the Wasps back in." He had been saving the Wasps to meet the new Heggies who could be arriving in little more than an hour, but this had to come first. "The 13th has its own problems. I'll talk to Van and see what he can do, but we're going to have to break this line the way we broke the line at the canal. Head-on, straight up. We can't give the Heggies seven kilometers of this peninsula to let them land their reinforcements. Remember, we've cut the bridges behind us."
